Amanda Antoni was found dead in a pool of blood in the basement of her Calgary home in 2015. Now, her story is featured in the latest season of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries, and co-creator Terry Dunn Meurer wonders: was it murder, or could it have been an accident?
The episode, titled Body in the Basement, delves into the mysterious circumstances of her death. She was found at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood, with not a shred of blood or DNA evidence that wasn’t her own. Her own foot prints in the blood suggest she moved around quite a bit in the hours that she spent bleeding out before she died, and even got up and walked around. So why didn’t she try to go upstairs, where her phone was found on the floor, to call for help?
“Body in the Basement is probably some weird, strange, bizarre accident. I don’t know how solvable that is. But I don’t know,” Meurer, who co-created Unsolved Mysteries in 1987 with John Cosgrove, tells MovieMaker.
We asked her what she thought it would take to solve the case, which is currently cold. But cold cases have been solved in the past from new tips generated after being featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, like the Craig Williamson case from season six and the Bonnie Haim case from season eight.
“Somebody would have to come forward and say that they had attacked her in her house. And I don’t know that that’s going to happen. I just don’t know if it was a stranger attack, an assault. It would be such a random crime,” she says.
“I think for me what was so interesting in that case was following Dave Sweet, the detective, following his thought process through that whole case. It’s rare. It was such a clear cut homicide. And then when the DNA comes back from all the blood in the basement and it’s only Amanda’s blood, Dave started to rethink everything and thought, could this be an accident?”
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The Amanda Antoni case is unique, Meurer says, because it’s so hard to tell what happened in the hours that she spent at the bottom of the basement stairs.
“That’s a case we find very unusual, because oftentimes you start with accident, and then oh, no, this actually is a homicide. You don’t usually start with homicide and then go to accident,” she says. “So we call it an unexplained death story.”
The reason Antoni’s case ended up on Unsolved Mysteries is because of the intrepid work of retired detective Dave Sweet.
“He’s the one that reached out to us. He recently retired, but he just before he retired, he just wanted to feel like he had done everything he could to make sure that there wasn’t a suspect out there who had done this,” Muerer adds. “There’s some really strange things: her phone was found so far away from where she was. And the fact that she was somehow coherent down in that basement, but maybe afraid to come up. The animals didn’t come down. That’s weird. There’s just a lot of strange, strange things.”
Meurer also has a hard time making sense of how the broken piggy bank that was found at the top of the basement stairs was involved.
“Having been at that house — we filmed that the actual house — it’s hard to see how that could have been an accident, that she could have hit her head on that piggy bank. It’s just that the trajectory of her body, it’s just so bizarre. It’s such a mystery.”
The Body in the Basement episode of Unsolved Mysteries Vol. 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
Main Image: Amanda Antoni pictured in Unsolved Mysteries Vol. 4, courtesy of Netflix